A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Sunday was the day of two giant meals. The first occurred at Johnny D's, after N&M wanted to visit Davis again with me, and maybe hit some real estate offices together, since we declared an official start to our housing search last weekend. (They've fallen for the area, by all accounts, going there many times by themselves since I first introduced them to it a couple of months ago.) They weren't impressed by the crowdedness, and I started getting worried about overselling them on the oatmeal when M couldn't talk about anything except oatmeal impact anticipation. But the wait was shorter than they said, and all was good once we sat down and demanded giant plates of food like crazy anime characters, to the tune of mellow, live xylophone music.

And lo, the oatmeal was good. But everyone felt too bloated to talk to real estate people, so we just perambulated around the square despite the cold winds and looked at buildings and wrote down phone numbers, before dissolving to pursue our own tasks,

My central task this weekend involved crafting the outline to the first chapter or two of the new book. I was surprised at how long it took, but this was probably from the fact that it went almost to paragraph-depth, hundreds of lines long. It's all good.

(I used OmniOutliner for the job, which I have found useful enough to be worth my $21.12.)

Recent email suggests that I have something to learn about writing for this space; I gawped at my perception that the first chapter, as outlined in the proposal, would be enormous, and Chuck is all, "Naw, you can do that in 30 pages. This is a nutshell book, remember." I think this was before he saw my mega-outline, so he may be able to give me some advice there. (Update: he just mailed to say that his mail client autofiltered my outlines into his trash can, so he didn't see them until just now. Heh.)

The second Giant Meal happened at Buddha's Delight, a vegetarian (possibly even vegan) Chinese restaraunt, visited with part of a theatergoing party headed by magid. We agreed the food was yummy, but shared disappointment that the menu seemed to be mostly fake-meat dishes, instead of entrees that don't need meat of any level of veracity.

At dinner, while looking out the window at the Chinatown scenery, I was reminded of the strange person, place, or thing that cthulhia and queue once insisted I go see, somewhere in Boston proper, without telling me what it was. And now I cannot recall the location of this curious entity. My out-loud recollection sparked the interest of magid, who started listing random bizarre objects lying around Boston she knows about until I confessed that I really had no idea.

Then we went to see MacBeth but it was canceled because a lead actor was sick and without understudy. Next week, instead.

A smart person of whom I think highly just posted a fatalistic message to a mailing list discussion about palindromic timestamps, doubting that humanity will survive to experience 2112. This attitude, epsecially in such a person, I find deepy disappointing.

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Sitting in the 1369 now, in the rear corner, very comfortable.

How are the books doing? I'm supposed to be drafting up changes I want to make to the current P&X draft while it's moving through copyedit. I have maybe ten days before Linda starts sending mush-mush email at me, so I'm taking it easy. Maybe too easy. But, yes, I am feeling quite done enough with that book. The only changes I know it needs are code tweaks. (For instance, super-reviewer Mike Stok pointed out to me how nearly all my example programs that take filenames as arguments would choke with files named "0", since they check the command line values for truth, instead of for definition. I'd say something sarcastic about how I must accomodate readers who'd knowingly name a file "0", but I block myself by imagining a half-dozen murky situations where this might happen to a sane person. So be it.)

Meanwhile, Chuck has my revised outline, which I mailed on Saturday. Or so I think. I haven't heard from him since we last met Friday, which is unusual.

It's interesting to compare Linda and Chuck. So far they both seem really laid-back, but Linda prefers to take a hands-off approach with her writers, always available for communication but rarely starting it herself, while Chuck has so far been a lot more proactive with me, forwarding lots of thoughts and ideas my way and scheduling meetings, at least for the first couple of weeks after he first popped the question to me. He has said that he's been increasingly busy very lately, and that's probably the whole reason for his sudden lack of response. It won't hurt to pong a ping his way, though. I really want to get started! (And get a check.)

I've decided to next try wrapping my head around AppleScript Studio, Apple's new suite for developing Cocoa applications in humble AppleScript. I think this would serve as a fine introduction to Cocoa and Aqua programming in general. Mastering this would get me familiar with all of Next/Apple's magic IDE tools and hooks a lot faster than I would coming at it from a purely Objective C angle; AppleScript is a much simpler language, and an interpreted one, meaning less groveling over syntax while I learn. Nice.

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While here at the cafe, I opened a packet brother Ricky mailed me, and which I happened to have in my backpack. It conatined some extraordinary things: a short letter from Ricky, a Philip K Dick fanzine from 1989, containing an outline to an unpublished PKD novel, and two cute-yet-austere black-and-white photographs I have never before seen of Baby Prog playing peek-a-boo, one with blanket on head, one with blanket not on head. Ricky has never sent me interesting things before. How random! Belated happy Chaoflux, brother.

Backed by unanimous opinion of friends and family, I verbally agreed to take on the book today. Here we go. Chuck lent me a couple of other books to read as homework, along with my assignment to spruce up the outline draft he's already made.

I asked for the story leading up to his tapping me for this, and heard lots of fun history and politics about this corner of the ORA machine. Beyond being unseemly of me to describe it in a public venue, it would probably bore you. (And if you're a close friend you're doomed to hear me bring it up at some point anyway.) As to why he chose me in particular, he knew I was a Mac user and a blathersome hacker and had some free time on my hands, but more interestingly, I seem to be the second choice -- the first prospective author didn't want to go into any of the underlying Unix stuff at all, which is, really, the Wrong Answer. Curiously, this particular author had written the O'Reilly book that got me back into programming, many years ago. So turns the wheel, la la.

OK, here is my own friends-of-prog quiz. Tell me which is scarier.

a) The following email:

Hi Jason,

I'm wondering whether you might be available to work on "Mac OS X in a
Nutshell."

If so, please let me know. I've got a rough plan for this book and would
like someone to start working on it ASAP.

b) The fact that I find myself willing to consider it, despite my well-documented torment with "Perl & XML".

You may use a calculator. Some useful formulas are on the whiteboard.